Drudge dredges dollars

Business 2.0 figures out that proto-blogger Matt Drudge is getting rich. Drudge has the highest ROI in online media, strike that, any media, strike that, any business other that’s legal. (Via Hylton Jolliffe and Nick Denton.)

The genius of Drudge’s model is very, very, oldnews, but Business 2.0’s math is good.

Unfortunately, big media won’t be able to copy Drudge’s model. The DNA just isn’t right. As I wrote previously, “as commercial organisms, blogs have short life-cycles, small metabolisms and are run by flexible egos. Up against the old, thick-shell, high-burn, multi-cell media organisms, the blog is an ideal candidate to evolve and exploit the new environment.”

‘We have entered an era vibrating with the din of small voices,’ Drudge said in his 1998 speech to an assembly of sneering National Press Club members. As usual, Drudge was first with the story.